Taos

We spent Labor Day weekend in Taos - the southern vertex of our road trip triangle. Our adobe AirBnB was a perfect complement to the southwest geography and was beautifully situated just a little way outside town, on a slope along the western edge of the valley. This location, combined with its orientation on the property, provided a wonderful view east across to the Sangre de Cristos. It made for great sunrises - and if you walked around back, great sunsets, too.

A slow tire leak - and paranoia about older tires and a long isolated drive a few days in the future - might have potentially marred the weekend, but Saturday morning we dropped in at Silva's, where they found a staple and patched the tire for $10 cash. Right across from a laundromat. And not far from the Taos Diner. It all worked out so well. We drove up to the Pueblo (next post), then back into town. It was nice not to have to go anywhere.

We ate well in Taos, of course, aided by Trip Advisor and our perennial inability to turn down new places to graze. I was surprised how many of our choices ended up on the road north out of town as opposed in the village itself. The Love Apple, in an old church. The Taos Diner, twice. Gutiz. Orlando's. And more than one stop at the Coffee Spot. Besides food, we also bought a cool Navajo'ish piece for the wall.

Sunday we drove drove the Enchanted Circle, but the bright, hazy sky was less than perfect and we didn't stop anywhere for long. Which gave us more time to hang out in town and at the Caseta. After an early dinner, we also drove up the canyon to the ski area so I could check it out and get a closer glimpse of Wheeler Peak (a state highpoint that will have to wait for a future trip).

The bike remains a theme on the trip. Saturday morning I had an extremely pleasant ride down through the valley near town and then back on the mesa. And Monday morning, I drove a little way up 518, then rode my bike the rest of the way up US Hill (from 7500' to 8500'). Not fast, but great exercise! And very pretty (and chilly - glad I'd picked up full-fingered bike gloves at MEC a few weeks ago).

Cumbres & Toltec

We could have done the bus-train combination in either direction, but for some reason (likely the direction of travel and light and time of day), I had booked us to begin with the bus from Antonito CO to Chama NM and then returning to Antonito on the train. The bus leg was a beautiful drive (and only a few of us on the bus, so all in front rows chatting with the driver and enjoying the scenery).

The 60+ mile train trip back from Chama was wonderful and took much longer - the whole trip takes all day. Lunch is served cafeteria-style in Osier, where the eastbound and westbound trains meet - and resembled a more civilized version of powerful childhood images I had from old train books showing people piling off trains into crowded lunch rooms. We had opted for the intermediate level of service - the tourist car - which seemed to have been a good choice. Comfortable seating, free soft drinks and snacks, and easy access to the open gondola car.

The Cumbres & Toltec was built in 1880 as an extension to the Denver and Rio Grande. The narrow gauge line runs up and over Cumbres Pass from Chama and then follows the Los Pinos River and Toltec Canyon as it winds its way back down to Antonito, zigzagging back and forth across the CO-NM line.

It's remarkable that a small organization can successfully maintain such complex equipment and so much right of way. I guess they are regulated just as any other railroad, so are subject to much of the same oversight that major carriers are.

Pikes Peak

Note to self: next trip to the Rockies, don't schedule a quick trip to 14,000' on the first full day. In planning the trip, my main concern had been whether to drive up Pikes Peak or to reserve seats on the cog railway. The latter turned out to be a great way to do the trip. We dodged a few rain clouds and although the top wasn't completely clear, we could see back down to the prairies (not all the way to Kansas, nor west to the next major ranges). We heard some rolling thunder and saw some rain drops, but not much.

M did okay on the excursion itself, but spent the next several days fatigued and a little out of sorts, pretty likely an altitude response. I will know better next time.

I found the railway impressive and fun. It was a pretty crazy place to build it and amazing to think they run it year round. Must be because the weather is so much tamer here than on Mount Washington!

Pikes Peak is only 30th on the list of more than 50 peaks in Colorado between 14,000 and 14,500'. It's amazing how so many mountains can all rise to such a similar height. Geology - uplift history, isostasy, and glacial erosion have all been invoked (some problems with each explanation, although I guess the latter seems to have gotten the most attention recently). What's even more remarkable is that the other two highest peaks in the continental U.S., Mount Whitney in the Sierra Nevada and Mount Rainier in the Cascades, also are in the same basic range, despite completely different geologic histories and locations.

Garden of the Gods

We made it to the front range late on the second day out of Wisconsin. From Lincoln and North Platte (previous post), we followed I-80 and I-76 all the way to Denver, had a nice dinner in the rapidly upscaling RiNo (River North) District along Larimer, then tried to keep up with heavy 80 mph traffic on the curvy Interstate south to Colorado Springs. We had booked two days to catch our breath. Quite literally. Although in my following post I will admit to not really thinking this through very well.

Early Wednesday morning (we had been in Madison just Monday morning), I drove up to the empty visitor's center parking lot and unloaded my bike. The road up through Garden of the Gods includes a pair of rolling, smoothly paved, one-way loops that top out around 6500'.  What a beautiful, albeit oxygen-deficient, ride! I came back with M a couple of hours later. We mainly drove, and limited our walk to a fairly level one.

When the modern Rockies were forced upward (during the Laramide Orogeny), the Permian Lyons Sandstone was bent up and over the top of the older rocks underneath - like the precambrian granite that makes up Pikes Peak. The erosional remnants of these steeply tilted pink sand dunes are found up and down the front range.

Besides the Garden of the Gods, our trip also included Pikes Peak (next post). We did a neat loop up Gold Camp road and down North Cheyenne Canyon. We saw a little of older, downtown Colorado Springs, including Colorado College and the beautiful residential neighborhoods around it. And we had a great dinner at Shuga's. But much of what we saw was very generic strip malls and subdivisions sprawling up the hillsides around town.

Colorado Springs hosts a large collection of religious institutions (not just churches, but missionary organizations, Christian publishers, and other examples of corporate protestantism). I suspect that when the rapture comes, the angels may not waste much time trying to extract these folks from their gated communities.

North Platte

On our return trip in 2015, we had stayed in North Platte, but the viewing tower had been closed when I drove out early the next morning. And without the tower, it's very difficult to get a sense of the scale of what goes on here.

Union Pacific bills the Bailey Yard as the world's largest classification yard. It's a huge operation with two large humps to handle eastbound and westbound traffic. Hump yards refer to the way that freight cars are pushed one by one over an artificial hill, and then allowed to coast precisely onto any of a large number of classification tracks in the bowl from which new trains are built. I was mainly impressed by the number of big diesel locomotives moving around. Something like 130 trains a day pass through here.

M and I got together in part because of a shared interest in trains (at least it was one of our first conversation topics), but she just liked riding them. Little did she realize what an obsession trains were in my family! Of course, I don't even think of myself as a very serious train nut, but that's because I know just how much nuttier some folks can get. If the 8-mile complex was accurately modeled in HO (1:87), the resulting layout would need to be more than 500' long. In N-scale (1:160) it would still need to be almost as a long as a football field. In case you wondered!

Lincoln

Lincoln, Nebraska, is roughly half way between Wisconsin and the mountains, so it was where we stayed on our two-day leg from Madison to Colorado Springs.

On the way, we stopped and hiked around Ledges State Park in Iowa, which gave us some much needed exercise and a break from farm fields. I had visited a couple of years ago and enjoyed it: Boone 2012). We had dinner at the Loess Moose - a bar/burger joint north of Council Bluffs, then drove quickly around Omaha and into the sunset toward Lincoln.

Our hotel was in the renovated Haymarket District - a rejuvenated version of early Lincoln and the area around the old Union train station. We still had a little time to wander around - though it would have been nice to have a little more.

I rode my bike the next morning, a nice mix of bike paths along stream corridors and old rail lines -- but I also rode through downtown and checked out the state capitol. Of my ten early morning bike rides on this trip, this one was perhaps the least interesting, but it was still very pleasant - which I guess says something about how wonderful all of those bike rides were!

Taliesin

Spring Green sounds like the name of a festival or a household cleaner, and maybe it is, but it is also a small town in rural Wisconsin, about 35 miles west of Madison.

Frank Lloyd Wright lived and worked for much of his career at Taliesin, a compound he designed near Spring Green, just above the Wisconsin River, on old family property. There is a working farm and a still-used architecture studio (maintained much as the original, albeit with computers for the students), but the main attraction is the house.

D and I were struck, pretty much on the foreheads, with the low ceilings. Apparently, FLW did this on purpose (we assume the contractors didn't just misread the plans?). Was it because it helped him call attention to the horizontal lines of his designs (form before function?) or because he was fairly short and there was some sort of personal psychological rationale for this? I'm sure there have been theses (in psychology or in architecture?) written on this, but I have not read them.

The site is nicely kept up and the preservation folks are doing their best to try to keep the place from falling down, but clearly there are a few maintenance challenges. Some of these may stem from design or construction shortcomings. On the other hand, the place is getting old and much of this is to be expected.

Despite my skepticism about some of the more practical aspects of this work (he also wasn't very good at designing comfortable furniture), I really like his sense of design and I appreciate the way he built things to fit into their surroundings. Apparently, Taliesin is Welsh for "shining brow," which works well for this home perched near the top of a hill.

Madison

Our three week trip was sort of a big inverted triangle, with weekends spent at the vertices. Seattle, Madison, Taos, and back to Seattle. As usual, I took an awful lot of pictures, except, it appears, in Madison.

Apparently, we arrived in Madison the same weekend as many UW (Wisconsin) students, so it's probably a good thing we weren't staying in the Hampton downtown where we've been the last couple of trips. This time we stayed on the west side of town nearer to where D lives.

We arrived the same day as a couple of friends who were surprising him - and we took everyone to dinner at Dottie's Dumpling Dowry when we got into town Friday night.  On Saturday we toured Taliesen (a subsequent post) and on Sunday we visited Cave of the Mounds. We also celebrated his recent birthday - Mom even whipped up a batch of dirt cake. Traditions are traditions.

Madison has a great network of bike trails (most old railroad grades) - some of which I explored in a big loop on Saturday morning. There's one spot in Fitchburg, on the southwest side of Madison, where multiple trails intersect - apparently referred to as the VeloUnderound. A bike traffic circle with another bike path going overhead on a trestle.